Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955)

Shirley MacLaine, Jerry Lewis, Dorothy Malone, Dean Martin in Artists and Models

Cast: Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Shirley MacLaine, Dorothy Malone, Eddie Mayehoff, Eva Gabor, Anita Ekberg, George Winslow, Jack Elam. Screenplay: Herbert Baker, Hal Kanter, Frank Tashlin, Don McGuire, based on a play by Michael Davidson and Norman Lessing. Cinematography: Daniel L. Fapp. Art direction: Tambi Larsen, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Walter Scharf; songs: Jack Brooks, Harry Warren. 

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Cast: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Martha Hyer, Arthur Kennedy, Nancy Gates, Leora Dana, Betty Lou Keim, Larry Gates. Screenplay: John Patrick, Arthur Sheekman, based on a novel by James Jones. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: William A. Horning, Urie McCleary. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Like Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli had a special touch with the movie melodrama, taking its often objectively silly elements seriously enough that you can actually believe in them. The James Jones novel on which the screenplay for Some Came Running was based is one of those semi-autobiographical books that writers seem to need to get out of their systems, but adapting it meant challenging the Production Code strictures, particularly on sex, at almost every turn. So the characters in the film are only as believable as the actors can make them. There's a lot of shorthand in the film about the relationships between Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) and the two women in his life, the "schoolteacher" Gwen French (Martha Hyer) and the "floozie" Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). It's not immediately clear why Dave falls in love so swiftly with Gwen, who seems to want to mentor him as a writer more than she does to sleep with him, or why he stays connected with the illiterate and rattle-brained Ginnie, to the extent of marrying her on the rebound from Gwen. Fortunately, all three actors are adept at pulling characters out of the script, where they don't seem to have been fully written. Dean Martin was just beginning to show that he could act -- Howard Hawks would complete the process the following year with Rio Bravo -- and Minnelli helped give his career a boost by casting him as the alcoholic gambler Bama Dillert. And Arthur Kennedy completes the ensemble as Dave's go-getter older brother, Frank. Minnelli makes the most of these colorful performers, to the extent that MacLaine, Kennedy, and Hyer all received Oscar nominations. But he's also adept, as he would show in 1960 with Home From the Hill, at taking a real small town location and bringing it to full life, especially in the climactic scene that takes place in the carnival celebrating the town's centennial. The location gives the film a substance and reality that the script never quite supplies.

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

I could never countenance plagiarism, but as they say, if you're going to steal, steal from the best. Even if you're Howard Hawks stealing from Howard Hawks, which happens almost shamelessly in Rio Bravo. No one who loves Hawks's Red River (1948) as much as I do could fail to miss how much of Rio Bravo is, let us say, borrowed from that film. There's the byplay between Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) and Stumpy (Walter Brennan), which echoes that of Dunson (Wayne) and Groot (Brennan) in Red River. Ricky Nelson's young gun Colorado Ryan is a reworking of Montgomery Clift's Matthew Garth. And Angie Dickinson's Feathers could almost be a parody of Joanne Dru's motormouth Tess Millay. But the Hawksian borrowings don't stop with Red River. When Feathers kisses Chance for the first time and then goes in for a second kiss in which he participates more enthusiastically, she comments, "It's better when two people do it," which is a direct steal from a similar scene in To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1944) when "Slim" (Lauren Bacall) tells "Steve" (Humphrey Bogart), "It's even better when you help." The two movies share not only a director but also a screenwriter, Jules Furthman, who is joined in Rio Bravo by Leigh Brackett, who earlier worked together on another Bogart-Bacall-Hawks movie, The Big Sleep (1946). Even the composer of the score for Rio Bravo, Dimitri Tiomkin, gets into the borrowing game, taking a theme from his score for Red River and handing it over to lyricist Paul Francis Webster for the song, "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me," sung by Dean Martin's Dude and Nelson's Colorado. Rio Bravo isn't as great a movie as Red River by a long shot, and it probably signals some creative exhaustion on Hawks's part that he not only borrowed so heavily from his earlier work but also felt it necessary to remake Rio Bravo in two thinly disguised versions also starring Wayne, as El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970). But is there a more entertaining self-plagiarism, and a surer demonstration of what made Hawks one of the great filmmakers?